The latest attempt to clarify the murky rules on hastening another’s death

JUST one act in Britain—suicide—is legal to do yourself but illegal to help someone else commit. That singularity results from the Suicide Act of 1961, which decriminalised suicide but made assisting one punishable by up to 14 years in jail. The intention was to treat compassionately those who tried and failed to kill themselves (until that year they risked prosecution) while keeping other obstacles in the path of those contemplating suicide.

That fine and difficult judgment is being revisited this week in the House of Lords, in two different ways. Debbie Purdy, who has primary progressive multiple sclerosis, wants, when her life has become unbearable to her, to commit suicide at Dignitas, a clinic in Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal. By then she may be unable to travel alone, but under British law if her husband helps her, or even goes with her, he is likely to be committing a crime.

Ms Purdy has already tried and failed in two lower courts to force the director of public prosecutions to spell out the circumstances in which he would prosecute her husband. Without that clarity, rather than involving him she will travel alone while she is still able to. “I'm more frightened of being trapped in a body that's in pain and there's nothing I can do about it, than I am about dying early,” she says.

The five law lords who heard Ms Purdy's case are unlikely to publish their judgment for some weeks. But her hearing coincided with the passage through the House of Lords of the Coroners and Justice Bill—and it provides an opportunity for lords sympathetic to Ms Purdy's predicament to give her and others in a similar position the certainty they want.

Two clauses in the bill concern assisted suicide. They make it clear that encouraging others online to kill themselves counts as assisting suicide, even if it is never known who, if anyone, has killed himself as a result. Lord Falconer, a previous lord chancellor, proposes an amendment with a different twist. If someone declares before an independent witness his intention of committing suicide, and two doctors certify that he is terminally ill, a person accompanying him abroad for that purpose should not face prosecution.

Almost 800 Britons have signed up with Dignitas, Lord Falconer points out, and 100 have ended their lives there. Though prosecuting those going with them has in no case been deemed in the public interest, many fellow travellers have been interviewed by police and waited for months to learn that no charges would be brought. It is “time now for the law to catch up with the reality,” he says.

Four-fifths of Britons support changing the law. Since the Suicide Act, the nation has become less paternalistic, less likely to think the sanctity of life trumps all else and more likely to think that personal autonomy does. And a trickle of tragic tales keeps the issue in the public eye.

One such was that of Daniel James, a 23-year-old who, unable to bear having been paralysed in a rugby accident in 2007, persuaded his parents to accompany him to Dignitas last year. But Lord Falconer's amendment would not have made them immune from prosecution: their son was not terminally ill. Whatever the lords decide, there are sure to be more hard cases, and more attempts to change the law.